The name “Mesopotamia” derives from a Greek term meaning “land between the rivers.” The Royal Ontario Museum’s latest major exhibit, which opens on June 22, takes this literally, as visitors flow between painted representations of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on the floor.

Presented by the British Museum and rounded out with pieces from institutions in Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, Mesopotamia: Inventing Our World covers 3,000 years of human development in the cradle of urban civilization. Most of the 170 artifacts on display have never been shown in Canada.

There are a lot of chefs in the kitchen for the Canadian premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, a triptych set in three time periods that tells the stories of amateur actors (played by real actors) involved in staging performances of the story of Christ. Three different Toronto independent theatre companies, all with reputations for innovative staging and creation in their past work, each tackle one of the three acts. Ordinarily, such a complicated arrangement would be to a show’s detriment, but not in this case. While you need to be prepared for a marathon of theatre (the show runs four hours, incluing two intermissions), you’re certainly going to get your money’s worth.

“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

“Is not our unconventional family filled with love?” “Yes, but not as far as attractive marketing demographics are concerned.” (Screencap from The New Normal.)

Monday

The New Normal concludes its first season, which may or may not be its only season as the ratings have been not terribly great, to say the least. But then again this is an NBC show, and NBC these days is thrilled if the audience for a show consists of three teenagers and a cute puppy, and The New Normal reaches at least two teenagers and a scrappy mutt with character, so it is accordingly on the bubble. (CTV, 8:30 p.m.)

Tuesday

It’s the Blue Jays season opener, and fans are excited—baseball fans because the Jays look to be a strong team this year that can legitimately push for the playoffs, and sports fans in general because “Toronto sports team” and “competitive” are two concepts that traditionally are not chocolate and peanut butter, if you follow. Anyway, they’re hosting the Indians at Rogers Centre. (Sportsnet, 7 p.m.)

The Rick Mercer Report and This Hour Has 22 Minutes both have their season finales tonight, which is convenient because there will be no more news until they premiere again in the fall. Yes, we know we make this joke every time these shows debut and conclude, but tough. Jon Stewart’s breaks are a week or two every three or four months and then he goes right back to work. Suck it up, hosers! (CBC, 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. respectively)

Donut Showdown is an improperly-spelled cooking competition show about doughnuts. They’re spelled that way because doughnuts are fried dough, you see. Anyway, expect a lot of fancy gourmet doughnuts, many of which you will never want to eat. (Our over/under on foie gras doughnuts for the season is five.) (Food Channel, 10 p.m.)

Wednesday

We’re going to give How to Live with Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life) a chance, because it stars Sarah Chalke, and we love Sarah Chalke, and the cast also features Brad Garrett, Elizabeth Perkins, and Orlando Jones, who are all also very good at the acting and the comedic-ness. It has Jon Dore in it, and Televisualist historically is not strongly pro-Jon Dore, but we’re willing to keep an open mind given that it’s likely he won’t be writing his own lines. (City, 9:30 p.m.)

TLC brings back My Crazy Obsession because money. (10 p.m.)

Thursday

Some might call Hannibal a desperate ratings grab by NBC, but those people are cynics! Cynics! Just because Mads Mikkelsen plays Hannibal Lecter before anybody knew he was crazy as the creepiest person imaginable (he is even wearing A CREEPY LOOKING SUIT) in no way makes this otherwise bog-standard procedural show predictable as all get out. We don’t think even Laurence Fishburne can save this show, and that says something. (City, 10 p.m.)

Friday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Husbands And Knives,” the one with Jack Black as a rival comic book store guy, and featuring Alan Moore and Dan Clowes in vocal cameos. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Do you know anyone at Batman? ‘Cause I really want to draw Batman. I’m awesome at utility belts. Check these out. This is where the Batman keeps his money in case he has to take the bus.” (CFMT, 6:30 p.m.)

The Weekend

March Madness continues, and at this point most of the underdogs have been shaken out and the overdogs (are there such things, in fact, as overdogs?) have mostly reasserted themselves: Louisville were the favourites going into this tournament and they have pounded their opponents throughout, and neither Michigan nor Syracuse is a tremendous surprise in the Final Four either. The lone outlier remaining is Wichita State, who already dropped highly favoured Gonzaga earlier in the tournament, but of course that means they’re up against the Louisville juggernaut. (CBS, Louisville/Wichita State 6 p.m. Saturday, Michigan/Syracuse 8:30 p.m. Saturday)

It’s the 48th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards! Hosted by Blake Shelton, who really should do all the country music hosting for all the country music awards. Anyway, Televisualist always mentions the country music awards shows (all seventeen of them every year) because they are, as music awards shows go, the best of the lot: a lot of music, some nice speeches and a minimum of stupid awards-show bullshit. Many music awards shows could stand to follow this template. (CTV, 8 p.m. Sunday)

Our point is that this is nerd-energy better spent on figuring out which Community timeline caused Dan Harmon to get fired.

Monday

Hey! It’s a Here Comes Honey Boo Boo marathon! You can decide for yourself if this is a bad thing or a different type of bad thing. (TLC, 8 p.m.)

Who Do You Think You Are?, the show where famous people learn about their ancestors, has inexplicably been a hit everywhere else it’s been aired, so now it’s Canada’s turn to watch our own version of the show where celebrities are staggered to learn that they are descended from real people in surprising ways. The first episode is of course focused on Don Cherry, and unless we learn that he is in fact the product of hyena interbreeding at some point four or five generations back it’s going to be as boring as this show always is. (CBC, 8:30 p.m.)

Revolution is NBC’s much-ballyhooed sci-fi-ish offering of the year, and…it’s really bad. The premise (the world suddenly loses all forms of power, and can no longer generate power, because of A Conspiracy Or Something, although guns still work because they’re exciting) is stupid. The acting is largely boring (with the exception of Giancarlo Esposito as The Fascist Baddie Person, because Giancarlo Esposito makes all things better). The plot of the opening episode is trite. What we’re saying is that this is a bad television show and NBC and executive producer J.J. Abrams should feel bad, and NBC needs to stop trying to capture the Lost lightning in a bottle because that show debuted eight years ago and ended two and a half years ago, so maybe it’s time to try something else. (CTV, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

It’s time for the season premieres of The Rick Mercer Report and This Hour Has 22 Minutes, both of which will no doubt have timely commentary on Stephen Harper’s scientist gag order, Mitt Romney selecting Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential candidate, the Eurozone meltdown, the Olympics, and everything else that happened while our topical news comedy shows were off for their usual five-month break. (CBC, 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.)

Bad 25 is a documentary celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bad by Michael Jackson, and features a lot of old video footage of Michael preparing for and creating the album. While Televisualist acknowledges the importance of Michael Jackson as a general rule and understands that these sorts of shows are both inevitable and even meritious, BET’s attitude towards the whole affair comes across to us as mercenary and even somewhat ghoulish, and makes us think of our favorite MJ song, or at least the one most appropriate for this occasion. (BET, 8 p.m.)

Hot Set follows in the footsteps of Face Off‘s “Top Chef for movie jobs” trail by being a Top Chef-like contest show for set designers. If you like seeing people fiddle around with bits of scenery, this is the show for you! (Space, 10 p.m.)

Wednesday

Survivor comes back for its twenty-fifth season, and this time the gimmick they’re advertising is the usual “old castaways return.” In this case it’s three contestants who were forced to leave the game because of injury (Russell Swan from Survivor: Samoa, AKA “the non-evil Russell,” Michael Skupin from Australia who fell into a fire pit, and Jonathan “openly hates Jeff Probst and doesn’t give a damn who knows it and is therefore the best contestant ever” Penner, making his third return to the show). However, in addition to them, this season also has former all-star baseball player Jeff Kent, Blair from The Facts of Life, several beauty pageant winners, and a guy who has applied seventeen times to play the game. So it should be fun. We hope. Survivor is a very cast-dependent game, after all. (Global, 8 p.m.)

Titanic: Blood and Steel is yet another epic miniseries about the Titanic because just one of them was not enough to make us think “hm, maybe James Cameron’s movie wasn’t long enough.” (CBC, 9 p.m.)

OLN brings back Top Shot, because there’s nothing so much fun as people shooting at targets! (9 p.m.)

Thursday

The Office commences what is now officially Season The Last (or, if you prefer, Season Two Seasons After What Should Have Been The Last, or if you are a real cynic, Why Didn’t The Show End When Jim Married Pam). (Global, 8:30 p.m.)

Parks and Recreation also returns because there is beauty in this world, yes there is. (City, 8:30 p.m.)

Friday

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “Mother Simpson,” where Homer’s hippie mom returns after faking her death. “Mom, I’m sorry I never come to see you. I’m just not a cemetery person. ‘Here lies’—Walt Whitman? Damn you, Walt Whitman! I hate you, Walt freakin’ Whitman! Leaves of grass, my ass!” (Comedy Network, 8 p.m.)

Look, I know everybody was all “Honey Boo Boo is the worst thing in television ever,” but I present to you TLC’s latest offering, Secret Princes, wherein four foreign aristocrats who are all worth more than King Midas go to Atlanta and pretend to be poor working-class immigrants. In other words, this is Slumming: The Series. We challenge you to be introduced to Lord Robert Jonathan Walters without wanting to punch him in the dick. At least Honey Boo Boo is likeable. (10 p.m.)

The Weekend

It’s the 64th Annual Emmy Awards! The real ones, not the Daytime Emmys that are generally only used as doorstops or Susan Lucci taunting devices. The nominees this time around are the usual suspects: your premium HBO and AMC series, a buttload of nominations for Modern Family, et cetera. But Idris Elba did get nominated for Luther, and even if he doesn’t win (and he probably won’t), it’s nice to hope. Also, Jimmy Kimmel is hosting, and ten years ago I would not have thought that I would look forward to such a thing, but here we are. (CTV, 8 p.m. Sunday)

We originally considered The Sikhs Of St. John, but then decided on this, mostly because atheists are, let us face it, much dorkier.

Monday

Little Mosque on the Prairie concludes after a successful six-year run, and not coincidentally ends right as the CBC is facing brutal cuts in the most recent federal budget. Which leads us to John Doyle’s recent, very silly column, where he engaged in a lengthy round of victim-blaming. To Doyle, the CBC cuts are in some way the CBC’s fault for not, we suppose, creating the next Sopranos or Mad Men, but this is stupid. Had the CBC engaged in making top-tier-quality shows that got lower ratings (and doing so, we might add, in a Canadian television industry run by major media companies that are almost entirely opposed to creating original content except when they absolutely must), then the government would complain that the CBC wasn’t trying to make money. So, instead, the CBC made shows that were reasonably good and got decent if not spectacular audiences, and of course the Conservatives still complained because that is what Conservatives do. The CBC could do nothing that would make the government happy; now, Doyle is complaining because the network did not make the sort of shows he likes, and concluding that this is why it is under attack. (8:30 p.m.)

Cajun Pawn Stars is like regular Pawn Stars, but it’s spicy-like! Whoo-whee! And…okay, we’ve run out of things that the Cajun guy said in those old Kia Sportage commercials. Jambalaya, or something! (History Television, 10 p.m.)

Tuesday

The Rick Mercer Report and This Hour Has 22 Minutes have their season finales, because there is no news in between April and September, we guess. (CBC, 8 p.m.)

I, Martin Short, Goes Home is sort of a throwback in that it is an honest-to-god comedy special, just like in old times when Wayne and Shuster did sketches. Of course, all of the sketches have a Martin-Short-fake-biography theme chaining them together, but this is a minor detail when you get so many SCTV alumni showing up for the party (Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, et cetera). (CBC, 9 p.m.)

Top Shot comes back for its second season. “But wait,” you say, “isn’t the fourth season already airing in the United States?” And the answer, of course, is “you live in Canada, and this is how it works here.” Granted, it’s not like Top Shot is a show that ages poorly—you see people stunt-shooting things, and every episode is a new stunt—but even so. (Outdoor Life, 9 p.m.)

Wednesday

Best Friends Forever is the newest entrant in NBC’s “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” programming strategy. This time around, it’s about two women who are BFFs and former roommates, but now one gets divorced and comes back to move in with her BFF—except her BFF now has a live-in boyfriend! Sad trombone noise! Also there is a sassy black nine-year-old who is, apparently, some writer’s idea of what Mo’Nique was like as a child, and they get into arguments with her! Crazy slidewhistle noise! But it all works out in the end, with the audience going “awwwww!” (CTV2, 8:30 p.m.)

Oh god, there’s a Real Housewives of Vancouver now? What did we do to deserve that? This is probably because the Tories won last year. (Slice, 9 p.m.)

Full Metal Jousting is a reality competition show wherein people, well, joust. With armour and horses and everything. Gets repetitive really fast, but it’s worth at least 15 or 20 minutes of your time. (History Television, 9 p.m.)

Thursday

Scandal is interesting. On one hand, it features a strong black female protagonist played by Kerry Washington (who is fantastic) and a very solid cast that features Henry Ian Cusick, Guillermo Diaz, and Joshua Malina. On the other, this is a series about a protagonist who manages a “crisis management” firm, which is a nice way of saying that the hero of this series covers up the dirty secrets of the rich and powerful elite. It seems like a very odd time to put out this show, but who knows—maybe people are ready to cheer for the 1% again. (CTV, 8 p.m.)

The Simpsons rerun of the week: “The Springfield Files,” wherein Mulder and Scully come to Springfield and also Leonard Nimoy narrates for part of it. “Hello. I’m Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies. And in the end, isn’t that the real truth? The answer? Is no.” (Comedy Network, 1 a.m. Friday)

Friday

Four years later, Forgetting Sarah Marshall holds up well. Jason Segel is of course now a comedy star as opposed to just being the second banana on How I Met Your Mother, but it is worth remembering that before this movie, there were many people who still thought Mila Kunis was annoying rather than incredibly hot. On the downside, Russell Brand’s schtick is a little worn at this point, but he’s not so major a part of the film that it really matters. (Slice, 9 p.m.)

The Weekend

CSI: Miami comes to the conclusion of its 10th season, and this may well be the last that we see of Horatio Caine, as CBS is considering cancelling the show. How will the Internet continue without the “make bad pun, put on sunglasses, YEEEEAAAAAAAAHHH” meme? I mean, you could PhotoShop sunglasses onto anything and it would work: kittens, octopuses, Real Housewives, you name it. It’s a dark, dark day for Reddit if this happens because then…(puts on sunglasses) it would meme nothing. YEEEEEEEEAAAAHHHH! (CTV2, 10 p.m. Sunday)

The Borgias returns for its second season after being surprisingly much better than The Tudors ever was. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this season will have Ezio Auditore showing up to stab people in the face. This is the problem with the Assassin’s Creed games: they are so much better than real life, or for that matter Hollywood’s depiction of real life. Still, this is a pretty violent show and we should see at least a few stabbings this season, so we’ll take what we can get. (Bravo, 10 p.m. Sunday)